Brocade is buying privately held networking company Vyatta in an all-cash transaction. Financial terms of the acquisition were undisclosed. Vyatta created the industry's first and only platform-independent network operating system, Vyatta Network OS. The OS uses software-defined networking (SDN) to decouple routing and security software from proprietary hardware.

"This acquisition complements our R&D investments in Ethernet fabrics and SDN, as well as our broad industry and solutions-level partnerships that enable Brocade to pursue new market opportunities in data center virtualization, public cloud, enterprise virtual private cloud, and managed services," said Mike Klayko, CEO of Brocade. "We are now bolstering these 'build and partner' efforts with this strategic acquisition with the goal of being the innovation and thought leader in the software networking category."

Advancing Networks

Vyatta Network OS delivers advanced routing, security and VPN functionality for physical, virtual and cloud networking environments. The OS promises to empower system architects to secure and connect virtual, cloud or physical infrastructures while delivering the same elasticity, mobility, auto-provisioning and utility licensing benefits of the applications they support.

Brocade plans to leverage Vyatta technology to offer an end-to-end architecture built on a virtualized network infrastructure. This virtualized data center infrastructure aims to make both service providers and enterprises more agile by accelerating deployment and reducing development cycles in their networks.

Brocade said the technology extend its open data center fabric and IP networking technologies directly into any number of server hypervisor environments that gives customers the utmost choice and flexibility in selecting the right solution for their business needs.

"There are many significant developments happening today that are redefining data center architectures and industry landscapes," said Ken Cheng, vice president of the Routing, Application Delivery and Software Networking Group at Brocade. "The Vyatta acquisition brings in considerably more software networking technology and expertise to Brocade.

"We believe software networking to be a critical component in the next phase of network virtualization as enterprises are becoming increasingly virtualized and actively moving workloads to the cloud."

A Problem to Solve

Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, said Vyatta was not squarely in the SDN camp but the rise of SDN gives the company a problem its technology can solve.

"When you look at Brocade's SDN offering, it's limited primarily to LANs. Vyatta gives them a way to offer a software-based router to be able to connect those. The technology allows them to make their SDNs broader," Kerravala told us.

"From what I heard, they didn't pay a ton for the company. Brocade acquired some good technology for a reasonable price and can drop it into their product set to augment what they do fairly nicely. There's no overlap at all. There's no conflict. And there's no huge financial risk here."